Giles Auty, 85, painter turned punchy Spectator art critic and opponent of modernist orthodoxy

[Michael Rhodes]

__. Giles Auty, the painter and art critic who has died in Australia a month short of his 86th birthday, was throughout his career conspicuous for the frequently tactless polemical vehemence with which he expressed his views....With his combative approach he was too easily dismissed as an irrelevant reactionary, but he had important things to say, writes the Daily Telegraph

[Michael Rhodes]

_.Auty was a painter and art critic who settled in West Cornwall in 1959, and thereafter began to paint full-time.

By the 1970s he was beginning to write about art, and went on to becoming the New Statesman Arts critic. John MILLER mentions him, in his biography Leave Tomorrow Behind, as exhibiting at NAG in the 1960s, and in 1977 he exhibited with the Newlyn artists at Pont-Aven in their travelling show of Cornish work. He was also showing in London on a regular basis, and in 1992 exhibited with two other critics at Cadogan Contemporary. In 1995 he emigrated to Australia where he remains an art critic, residing in Sydney.